Finding first array value that contains a string in PostgreSql - sql

SELECT array_position(ARRAY, 'fillfactor=%') as position
FROM table;
I want to be able to use code similar to above. I do not know what the fill factor is before hand so i cannot do an exact string match, instead i want to grab the first value that starts with that statement. Note this sample assumes ARRAY is a text[] column. Can anyone please help?

There's no built-in function like array_regex_position or similar that would be able to do this. You will need to unnest your array and use a pattern-matching operator or function on the resulting elements. On the assumption you're querying pg_class.reloptions, this should give you the general idea (this is on 10.5, I don't have any 9.X servers running right now):
testdb=# create table t_with_fillfactor(asdf text) with (fillfactor=50);
CREATE TABLE
testdb=# select relname,
substr(reloption, length('fillfactor=')+1)::integer as fill_factor
from pg_class, unnest(reloptions) as reloption
where relname='t_with_fillfactor'
and reloption ~ 'fillfactor=.*';
relname | fill_factor
-------------------+-------------
t_with_fillfactor | 50
(1 row)

Related

Check if value exists in Postgres array

Using Postgres 9.0, I need a way to test if a value exists in a given array. So far I came up with something like this:
select '{1,2,3}'::int[] #> (ARRAY[]::int[] || value_variable::int)
But I keep thinking there should be a simpler way to this, I just can't see it. This seems better:
select '{1,2,3}'::int[] #> ARRAY[value_variable::int]
I believe it will suffice. But if you have other ways to do it, please share!
Simpler with the ANY construct:
SELECT value_variable = ANY ('{1,2,3}'::int[])
The right operand of ANY (between parentheses) can either be a set (result of a subquery, for instance) or an array. There are several ways to use it:
SQLAlchemy: how to filter on PgArray column types?
IN vs ANY operator in PostgreSQL
Important difference: Array operators (<#, #>, && et al.) expect array types as operands and support GIN or GiST indices in the standard distribution of PostgreSQL, while the ANY construct expects an element type as left operand and can be supported with a plain B-tree index (with the indexed expression to the left of the operator, not the other way round like it seems to be in your example). Example:
Index for finding an element in a JSON array
None of this works for NULL elements. To test for NULL:
Check if NULL exists in Postgres array
Watch out for the trap I got into: When checking if certain value is not present in an array, you shouldn't do:
SELECT value_variable != ANY('{1,2,3}'::int[])
but use
SELECT value_variable != ALL('{1,2,3}'::int[])
instead.
but if you have other ways to do it please share.
You can compare two arrays. If any of the values in the left array overlap the values in the right array, then it returns true. It's kind of hackish, but it works.
SELECT '{1}' && '{1,2,3}'::int[]; -- true
SELECT '{1,4}' && '{1,2,3}'::int[]; -- true
SELECT '{4}' && '{1,2,3}'::int[]; -- false
In the first and second query, value 1 is in the right array
Notice that the second query is true, even though the value 4 is not contained in the right array
For the third query, no values in the left array (i.e., 4) are in the right array, so it returns false
unnest can be used as well.
It expands array to a set of rows and then simply checking a value exists or not is as simple as using IN or NOT IN.
e.g.
id => uuid
exception_list_ids => uuid[]
select * from table where id NOT IN (select unnest(exception_list_ids) from table2)
Hi that one works fine for me, maybe useful for someone
select * from your_table where array_column ::text ilike ANY (ARRAY['%text_to_search%'::text]);
"Any" works well. Just make sure that the any keyword is on the right side of the equal to sign i.e. is present after the equal to sign.
Below statement will throw error: ERROR: syntax error at or near "any"
select 1 where any('{hello}'::text[]) = 'hello';
Whereas below example works fine
select 1 where 'hello' = any('{hello}'::text[]);
When looking for the existence of a element in an array, proper casting is required to pass the SQL parser of postgres. Here is one example query using array contains operator in the join clause:
For simplicity I only list the relevant part:
table1 other_name text[]; -- is an array of text
The join part of SQL shown
from table1 t1 join table2 t2 on t1.other_name::text[] #> ARRAY[t2.panel::text]
The following also works
on t2.panel = ANY(t1.other_name)
I am just guessing that the extra casting is required because the parse does not have to fetch the table definition to figure the exact type of the column. Others please comment on this.

Return rows where first character is non-alpha

I'm trying to retrieve all columns that start with any non alpha characters in SQlite but can't seem to get it working. I've currently got this code, but it returns every row:
SELECT * FROM TestTable WHERE TestNames NOT LIKE '[A-z]%'
Is there a way to retrieve all rows where the first character of TestNames are not part of the alphabet?
Are you going first character only?
select * from TestTable WHERE substr(TestNames,1) NOT LIKE '%[^a-zA-Z]%'
The substr function (can also be called as left() in some SQL languages) will help isolate the first char in the string for you.
edit:
Maybe substr(TestNames,1,1) in sqllite, I don't have a ready instance to test the syntax there on.
Added:
select * from TestTable WHERE Upper(substr(TestNames,1,1)) NOT in ('A','B','C','D','E',....)
Doesn't seem optimal, but functionally will work. Unsure what char commands there are to do a range of letters in SQLlite.
I used 'upper' to make it so you don't need to do lower case letters in the not in statement...kinda hope SQLlite knows what that is.
try
SELECT * FROM TestTable WHERE TestNames NOT LIKE '[^a-zA-Z]%'
SELECT * FROM NC_CRIT_ATTACH WHERE substring(FILENAME,1,1) NOT LIKE '[A-z]%';
SHOULD be a little faster as it is
A) First getting all of the data from the first column only, then scanning it.
B) Still a full-table scan unless you index this column.

PostgreSQL ORDER BY issue - natural sort

I've got a Postgres ORDER BY issue with the following table:
em_code name
EM001 AAA
EM999 BBB
EM1000 CCC
To insert a new record to the table,
I select the last record with SELECT * FROM employees ORDER BY em_code DESC
Strip alphabets from em_code usiging reg exp and store in ec_alpha
Cast the remating part to integer ec_num
Increment by one ec_num++
Pad with sufficient zeors and prefix ec_alpha again
When em_code reaches EM1000, the above algorithm fails.
First step will return EM999 instead EM1000 and it will again generate EM1000 as new em_code, breaking the unique key constraint.
Any idea how to select EM1000?
Since Postgres 9.6, it is possible to specify a collation which will sort columns with numbers naturally.
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/collation.html
-- First create a collation with numeric sorting
CREATE COLLATION numeric (provider = icu, locale = 'en#colNumeric=yes');
-- Alter table to use the collation
ALTER TABLE "employees" ALTER COLUMN "em_code" type TEXT COLLATE numeric;
Now just query as you would otherwise.
SELECT * FROM employees ORDER BY em_code
On my data, I get results in this order (note that it also sorts foreign numerals):
Value
0
0001
001
1
06
6
13
۱۳
14
One approach you can take is to create a naturalsort function for this. Here's an example, written by Postgres legend RhodiumToad.
create or replace function naturalsort(text)
returns bytea language sql immutable strict as $f$
select string_agg(convert_to(coalesce(r[2], length(length(r[1])::text) || length(r[1])::text || r[1]), 'SQL_ASCII'),'\x00')
from regexp_matches($1, '0*([0-9]+)|([^0-9]+)', 'g') r;
$f$;
Source: http://www.rhodiumtoad.org.uk/junk/naturalsort.sql
To use it simply call the function in your order by:
SELECT * FROM employees ORDER BY naturalsort(em_code) DESC
The reason is that the string sorts alphabetically (instead of numerically like you would want it) and 1 sorts before 9.
You could solve it like this:
SELECT * FROM employees
ORDER BY substring(em_code, 3)::int DESC;
It would be more efficient to drop the redundant 'EM' from your em_code - if you can - and save an integer number to begin with.
Answer to question in comment
To strip any and all non-digits from a string:
SELECT regexp_replace(em_code, E'\\D','','g')
FROM employees;
\D is the regular expression class-shorthand for "non-digits".
'g' as 4th parameter is the "globally" switch to apply the replacement to every occurrence in the string, not just the first.
After replacing every non-digit with the empty string, only digits remain.
This always comes up in questions and in my own development and I finally tired of tricky ways of doing this. I finally broke down and implemented it as a PostgreSQL extension:
https://github.com/Bjond/pg_natural_sort_order
It's free to use, MIT license.
Basically it just normalizes the numerics (zero pre-pending numerics) within strings such that you can create an index column for full-speed sorting au naturel. The readme explains.
The advantage is you can have a trigger do the work and not your application code. It will be calculated at machine-speed on the PostgreSQL server and migrations adding columns become simple and fast.
you can use just this line
"ORDER BY length(substring(em_code FROM '[0-9]+')), em_code"
I wrote about this in detail in this related question:
Humanized or natural number sorting of mixed word-and-number strings
(I'm posting this answer as a useful cross-reference only, so it's community wiki).
I came up with something slightly different.
The basic idea is to create an array of tuples (integer, string) and then order by these. The magic number 2147483647 is int32_max, used so that strings are sorted after numbers.
ORDER BY ARRAY(
SELECT ROW(
CAST(COALESCE(NULLIF(match[1], ''), '2147483647') AS INTEGER),
match[2]
)
FROM REGEXP_MATCHES(col_to_sort_by, '(\d*)|(\D*)', 'g')
AS match
)
I thought about another way of doing this that uses less db storage than padding and saves time than calculating on the fly.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/47522040/935122
I've also put it on GitHub
https://github.com/ccsalway/dbNaturalSort
The following solution is a combination of various ideas presented in another question, as well as some ideas from the classic solution:
create function natsort(s text) returns text immutable language sql as $$
select string_agg(r[1] || E'\x01' || lpad(r[2], 20, '0'), '')
from regexp_matches(s, '(\D*)(\d*)', 'g') r;
$$;
The design goals of this function were simplicity and pure string operations (no custom types and no arrays), so it can easily be used as a drop-in solution, and is trivial to be indexed over.
Note: If you expect numbers with more than 20 digits, you'll have to replace the hard-coded maximum length 20 in the function with a suitable larger length. Note that this will directly affect the length of the resulting strings, so don't make that value larger than needed.

What is the correct way to define a Postgres SQL-lang function that returns multiple columns?

I have the following function, based on the SQL Functions Returning Sets section of the PG docs, which accepts two arrays of equal length, and unpacks them into a set of rows with two columns.
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION unpack_test(
in_int INTEGER[],
in_double DOUBLE PRECISION[],
OUT out_int INTEGER,
OUT out_double DOUBLE PRECISION
) RETURNS SETOF RECORD AS $$
SELECT $1[rowx] AS out_int, $2[rowx] AS out_double
FROM generate_series(1, array_upper($1, 1)) AS rowx;
$$ LANGUAGE SQL STABLE;
I execute the function in PGAdmin3, like this:
SELECT unpack_test(int_col, double_col) FROM test_data
It basically works, but the output looks like this:
|unpack_test|
|record |
|-----------|
|(1, 1) |
|-----------|
|(2, 2) |
|-----------|
...
In other words, the result is a single record, as opposed to two columns. I found this question that seems to provide an answer, but it deals with a function that selects from a table directly, whereas mine accepts the columns as arguments, since it needs to generate the series used to iterate over them. I therefore can't call it using SELECT * FROM function, as suggested in that answer.
First, you'll need to create a type for the return value of your function. Something like this could work:
CREATE TYPE unpack_test_type AS (out_int int, out_double double precision);
Then change your function to return this type instead of record.
Then you can use it like this:
SELECT (unpack_test).out_int, (unpack_test).out_double FROM
(SELECT unpack_test(int_col, double_col) FROM test_data) as test
It doesn't seem possible to take a function returning a generic record type and use it in this manner.

How do I sort a VARCHAR column in PostgreSQL that contains words and numbers?

I need to order a select query using a varchar column, using numerical and text order. The query will be done in a java program, using jdbc over postgresql.
If I use ORDER BY in the select clause I obtain:
1
11
2
abc
However, I need to obtain:
1
2
11
abc
The problem is that the column can also contain text.
This question is similar (but targeted for SQL Server):
How do I sort a VARCHAR column in SQL server that contains words and numbers?
However, the solution proposed did not work with PostgreSQL.
Thanks in advance, regards,
I had the same problem and the following code solves it:
SELECT ...
FROM table
order by
CASE WHEN column < 'A'
THEN lpad(column, size, '0')
ELSE column
END;
The size var is the length of the varchar column, e.g 255 for varying(255).
You can use regular expression to do this kind of thing:
select THECOL from ...
order by
case
when substring(THECOL from '^\d+$') is null then 9999
else cast(THECOL as integer)
end,
THECOL
First you use regular expression to detect whether the content of the column is a number or not. In this case I use '^\d+$' but you can modify it to suit the situation.
If the regexp doesn't match, return a big number so this row will fall to the bottom of the order.
If the regexp matches, convert the string to number and then sort on that.
After this, sort regularly with the column.
I'm not aware of any database having a "natural sort", like some know to exist in PHP. All I've found is various functions:
Natural order sort in Postgres
Comment in the PostgreSQL ORDER BY documentation